The Booklovers' Guide to Wine

by Patrick Alexander

  Although most Chinese wine comes from the Xinjiang Autonomous Region on the border with Pakistan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and Kazakhstan, a new northern area, Ningxia Province, also bordering the Gobi Desert, is rapidly becoming the center of China’s fine-wine industry. With 160,000 acres of vineyards planned by 2020, Ningxia will be three times the size of Napa. The French luxury goods giant LVMH has recently invested $28 million in a state-of-the-art winery called Chandon. An international competition named “Bordeaux Against Ningxia” was held in Beijing in December 2011, when experts from China and France tasted five wines from each region. Ningxia was the clear winner, with four out of five of the top wines. The best wine in the whole competition was the 2009 Chairman’s Reserve, a Cabernet Sauvignon which even Robert Parker rated as “not bad.” It is unclear whether the name referred to Chairman Mao and his Little Red Book.

  Another rapidly expanding wine-growing area is Shandong Province on the coast of the Yellow Sea, which, with 140 wineries, already produces 40 percent of Chinese wine. The latest company to invest in Shandong is Bordeaux’s Domains Barons de Rothschild, which harvested its third vintage in 2015. Based on Rothschild’s previous successes in California and Chile, Shandong Province is a region to keep an eye on.

  In just the past decade, China has become one of the world’s top ten wine markets, and is actually the largest consumer of red wine in the world, as well as being the sixth largest producer of wine. Between 2006 and 2015, China’s wine consumption grew by 54 percent. According to Sotheby’s, it is no longer London or New York but Hong Kong which is now the world’s largest market for fine wines at auction. Furthermore, China is one of the world’s biggest consumers of Bordeaux’s Premier Cru wines, and has had a significant effect on the price structure. Chinese billionaires have long had a predilection for Château Lafite (like the English aristocracy before them), followed by Château Latour, Château Mouton-Rothschild, Château Margaux and finally by Château Haut-Brion. This preference for Lafite has had the unfortunate consequence of making Lafite the most popular target of international wine-fraud, resulting in a number of recent scandals and uncertainty in the Chinese market. There is a growing tendency among Chinese billionaires, therefore, to focus on the previously overlooked Château Haut-Brion wines (Jefferson’s favorite), because its unique bottle shape makes it more difficult for criminals to reproduce.

  But despite China’s seeming integration into the international wine market, it retains certain Chinese idiosyncrasies. For example, the reason that Chinese are almost exclusively red wine drinkers has less to do with their appreciation of tannins and more to do with red being a lucky color traditionally associated with good fortune and good health. The Chinese still serve wine in small, shot-sized wine glasses, and, although it is a sign of progress that wine is replacing strong baijiu spirits at business banquets, it means that when that priceless 1959 Château Lafite is being poured, all the guests can toss it back in a hearty group toast without even needing to taste it.

  New Zealand

  Wine was not traditionally part of New Zealand culture, which was more centered on beer, rugby, and sheep. Indeed, alcoholic consumption in New Zealand was focused on the six o’clock swill, which was the hour between the end of work at 5:00 p.m. and the closing of public bars at 6:00 p.m., during which time men would desperately try to consume as much beer as physically possible. John Cleese, of Monty Python fame, visited New Zealand on tour in 1964, and even he was impressed by the level of desperate public intoxication demonstrated during that one short hour. Introduced during the First World War, the swill was part of New Zealand culture until the late 1960s, when bar closing time was finally extended till 10:00 p.m.

  As a valued member of the British Commonwealth, New Zealand was able to export all its agricultural produce —especially sheep and lamb—into England, which happily consumed as much lamb as the New Zealanders were able to ship. So with a week spent rearing sheep, some rugby at the weekend, and as much beer as the swill would allow, life was good and there was little demand for wine. Furthermore, New Zealand was so isolated from the rest of the world that there was little international travel, and thus little exposure to other cultures—especially those that drank wine. The only vines grown in New Zealand were planted by some mid-century Croatian immigrants from Dalmatia, and the resulting wine was known as Dally-Plonk.

  This idyllic state of affairs came to a sudden end in 1973, when the United Kingdom joined the European Economic Community and suddenly import duties were imposed on products from the Commonwealth. Overnight the British stopped importing New Zealand lamb, and so the Kiwi government needed to find an alternative to sheep rearing to support the national economy. Bravely, they decided to switch to viniculture, and seeing a geographic and climate similarity with Germany, the government paid farmers to replace their sheep pastures with Muller Thurgau grapes. Ten years later, supported by yet more government money, the farmers ripped up their Muller Thurgau vineyards and replanted them with more fashionable grapes, like Chardonnay and Sauvignon Blanc.

  With the abolition of the six o’clock swill in 1967 and the growing exposure of young New Zealanders to European culture following the arrival of passenger jets in the late 1960s, a developing local market for wine began to replace the culture of beer. Following the success of the Californians at the 1976 Judgment of Paris, winemakers around the world received a boost of confidence and were encouraged to experiment with their own wine styles instead of slavishly copying the French.

  The big breakthrough came in 1985, when a winemaker called Ernie Hunter entered his Sauvignon Blanc wines in the Sunday Times international wine competition in London. His wines won and were voted top Sauvignon Blancs in 1986, 1987, 1988, 1992 and 2001. Very soon, other Sauvignon Blanc wines, also from Cloudy Bay in Marlborough, on the northern tip of South Island, won attention in London. Because of the unrivaled importance of the London wine market and unparalleled influence of the English wine magazines, Marlborough wines have ever since been hailed as among the best Sauvignon Blancs in the world. Indeed, some critics claim they are superior to France’s more austere and acidic Sancerre and Pouilly Fumé wines from the Loire Valley. Others have described the fruit-forward Marlborough Sauvignon-Blanc as tasting like cat’s-pee on a gooseberry bush, though it’s unclear how familiar New Zealanders are with the taste of gooseberries. In any event, Marlborough is now firmly established as one of the world’s leading producers of Sauvignon Blanc. Across the strait from Marlborough, in Martinborough at the southern tip of North Island, the region is becoming world-famous for its Pinot Noirs and Chardonnays. Obviously, the powerfully dangerous and unpredictable waters surging between the two islands of New Zealand, joining the Tasmanian Sea to the Pacific Ocean, must have a powerfully benign effect on grape production.

  Hawkes Bay on North Island, being closer to the equator and thus receiving more sun, produces decent red wines—some Cabernet Sauvignon, but mainly Merlot. At the other extreme, Central Otego at the southern end of South Island, has the most southerly vineyards on earth and, despite the fury of the Antarctic waters and winters, wine writer Jancis Robinson considers it one of the five top wine-growing areas in the world—especially noted for its Burgundy-like Pinot Noir, Pinot Gris, and Riesling.

  In a period of about just forty years, New Zealand has changed its culture from one of beer-swilling rugby players to one of the world’s major cultivators of fine wine. For a small remote country on the edge of the world, it has managed to install a most impressive selection of excellent wines on the shelves of wine stores everywhere.

  South Africa

  With its Mediterranean climate, well-drained soils of clay, shale, and limestone, proximity to the waters of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, and warm growing climate, South Africa is the ideal place to grow top-quality wines. Hugh Johnson wrote, “The most dramatically beautiful wine country in the world is surely South Africa.” Geographically, it was ideally located for th
e Dutch and English fleets to restock with fresh wine en route to their empires and colonies further to the east.

  The first vineyards were planted by the Dutch in 1654, initially just to supply the Dutch sailors heading to the Orient, but by the end of the seventeenth century, the sweet white wines of Constantia were so highly-regarded that they were being shipped back to Europe for the Royal courts. Both Frederick the Great of Prussia and Catherine the Great of Russia praised the dessert wines of Constantia, and Napoleon Bonaparte had as much as 1,126 liters (297 gallons) of Constantia wine shipped in wooden casks each year to Longwood House, his home in exile on St. Helena, from 1815 until his death in 1821. The Count de las Cases reported that, on his deathbed, after consuming thirty bottles each month, Napoleon refused everything offered to him but a glass of Constantia wine. Even Jane Austen recommended Constantia wine’s healing powers for a disappointed heart, and other writers, from Charles Dickens to Charles Baudelaire, spoke glowingly of its charms and pleasures.

  The sudden influx of French Huguenots starting in 1688 added French winemaking skills to the well-established viticultural skill of the Dutch farmers, and South African wines were soon in great demand throughout Europe, especially in England, where they benefited until 1860 from favorable Empire import tariffs.

  This happy situation came to an end at the close of the nineteenth century with the double-whammy of Phylloxera and the Boer War (1899-1902). The Boer War not only badly damaged England’s international reputation and the South African economy, but also introduced institutionalized racial discrimination, leading eventually to apartheid. Phylloxera, as it did everywhere, destroyed all the vineyards, forcing winegrowers out of business, or causing them eventually to replant with new vines. Unfortunately, most farmers chose to replant with low-quality but high-yielding grapes like Cinsaut, which was the bulk wine grape of French North Africa and Languedoc.

  The widespread replanting of high-yielding Cinsaut quickly resulted in a national wine glut, and to combat desperate scenes of surplus wine being poured into rivers and wells, the government in 1918 established a co-op to control the wine industry, Koöperatieve Wijnbouwers Vereniging van Zuid-Afrika Bpkt (KWV). Through most of the twentieth century, as South Africa became increasingly isolated due to its apartheid policies, the rigid bureaucracy of the KWV slowly strangled the wine industry, and most South African wine was used for the production of cheap brandy and cooking Sherry.

  With the release of Nelson Mandela and the end of apartheid in 1990, the dead hand of the KWV was removed, and South Africa finally began the renaissance of its wine industry. With private, international investment, modern technologies, and flying winemakers from around the world, South African wines are once again becoming respected and sought after.

  South African Varietals: As noted, following the Phylloxera epidemic, most vineyards were replanted with the high-yielding Cinsaut grape from the Languedoc, which was renamed Hermitage. This was cloned with Pinot Noir to produce Pinotage, which is a varietal unique to South Africa.

  The most widely-planted grape in South Africa is Chenin Blanc, locally referred to as “Steen,” which is more acidic and crisp than the more usual style from the Loire Valley. The most popular red grape is Cabernet Sauvignon.

  South African Wine Regions: Most South African wine is grown and produced on the southern tip of the continent within one hundred miles of Cape Town. The three most important regions are almost suburbs of the city: Constantia, Paarl, and Stellenbosch.

  Constantia was, of course, famous from the seventeenth through nineteenth century for producing some of the world’s best white wine. In recent years, the winery Klein Constantia has been scrupulously reproducing the original wine using the same natural methods and the same Muscat vine as was used in the eighteenth century. The resulting wine, Vin de Constance, is the wine that Nelson Mandela drank to celebrate his release from prison in 1990.

  Paarl, because it housed the offices of the KWV, was the center of the wine industry for most of the twentieth century; however, the real center of South African wine today is the region of Stellenbosch. Stellenbosch is especially noted for its Sauvignon Blanc, which ranks with the world’s best and also for its Bordeaux-style reds. The University of Stellenbosch has a reputation similar to Adelaide’s Wine Research Institute and UC Davis for research into wine production, and the Stellenbosch Vine-Hopper railway wine tour is perhaps the world’s most delightful way to explore a wine region.

  After a century of bad fortune and mismanagement, South African wines are emerging to claim their rightful place on the world market. These wines have great potential.

  USA/North America

  The first Europeans to discover America called it Vineland. In the year AD 1000, the Viking explorer Leif Erikson, exploring the coast of Newfoundland, was excited to discover native vines growing wild, thus starting a European obsession with producing wine in America.

  Five hundred years later, when the second wave of Europeans arrived, the English, Spanish, and French colonists were determined to plant vines and make American wine. In 1570, the Spanish Missionary Father Juan de la Carrera wrote back to the king about some beautiful vineyards he had discovered in today’s South Carolina, “so beautiful and well plotted as any in Spain.” A few years later Sir Walter Raleigh founded an ill-fated colony in Roanoke in today’s North Carolina, attracted by the plethora of grapes growing in wild profusion. Sir Walter was acting on behalf of Queen Elizabeth, who was determined to gain an independent source of wine without being endlessly beholden to England’s eternal enemies, the French and the Spanish.

  Elizabeth’s successor, King James I, was so fond of wine that he gave standing orders to the royal cellar master to deliver twelve gallons of Sherry per day to the King’s table. Like Elizabeth, James was equally determined to create an independent source of wine, free of foreign interference. James established the first English colony in Jamestown with the express purpose of making wine. The very first official meeting of the English colonists in 1619, and the first law passed in the New World, was to enforce all men who headed a household to grow European grapes:

  “… every household doe yearly plante and maintaine ten vines, until they have attained to the arte and experience of dressing a Vineyard, either by their owne industry, or by the Instruction of some Vigneron. And that upon what penalty soever the Gouvernour and Counsell of Estate shall thinke fitt to impose upon the neglecters of this acte.”

  It was later decided that the penalty for failing to follow this law should be “on paine of death.”

  From Captain John Smith to Lord Baltimore and William Penn, the English were determined to create an independent source of wine in America, and throughout the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, the English colonists endlessly tried making wine from the Native American vines, Vitis labrusca and Vitis riparia. They also tried importing and growing the European vine Vitis vinifera, but all to no avail. The European vines died, while the wine made from American vines was undrinkable. Wines made from Vitis labrusca and other Native American vines are always described as having a “foxy” taste—le goût de Reynard or, less politely, pissat de Reynard—“fox piss.”

  Thomas Jefferson continued the quest as Ambassador, as President, and as landowner, but though he was successful at all his other ventures, he was a complete failure in the cultivation of wine. In all his thirty-six years of dedicated trying, he never produced a single bottle. Apart from loving wine personally as a connoisseur, Jefferson believed passionately in the civilizing effects of wine on the population. As ambassador to France, he was more than familiar with the moderating effects of wine on sophisticated French culture when compared to the rough savagery of the gin and whiskey culture back home in the colonies. If the common people drank wine instead of spirits, he argued, life would be less violent and more civilized: “No nation is drunken where wine is cheap; and none sober where the dearness of wine substitute
s ardent spirits as the common beverage. It is, in truth, the only antidote to the bane of whiskey.” But despite his best efforts, all Jefferson’s vineyard plantings eventually died, and he never produced any American wine that was drinkable.

  The French, in New France, which at one point contained most of North America—a vast tract east of the Rockies and west of the Appalachians, from New Orleans to the north of Quebec—had no more luck than the English in successfully planting vines. They all died. It was not until the Spanish sent missionaries up the Californian coast in the eighteenth century that European vines finally took successful root in North America.

  Although California produces a disproportionate 90 percent of the total, at the start of the twenty-first century, vines are now grown and wine is made in all of the fifty United States. After the colonists’ well-documented failures on the East Coast, the first successful winery opened in Cincinnati, Ohio, in the 1830s, and by 1850, the wines of Ohio were being rivaled by the wines of Missouri, where German winemakers had developed several successful wineries centered on the German colony of Herman. Unfortunately, the twin disasters of Phylloxera and Prohibition at the end of the century, as discussed in more detail elsewhere, completely destroyed the US wine industry, which only began to recover in the latter half of the twentieth century.